I.3 — Weather

A mood arrives the way weather does — from somewhere out of sight, without asking. It fills the whole sky of a morning, and while it is there it is hard to remember that the sky was ever another color.

Watch one for a day. Not the mood's story, which will say it is about your life. The mood itself: when it came, how it sat in the body, when it thinned. By evening it will have changed at least once, likely more. That is the first mark of things, and it is easier to see in weather than anywhere else. Everything you can find is moving. The moods move fastest.

This is not a trick for feeling better. A gray day is gray. But a gray day mistaken for a verdict — on you, on the shape of your life — is a different thing from a gray day seen as weather. One is a sentence. The other is a sky.

You cannot argue weather away, and you do not need to. You need only stop mistaking it for the climate. Check it against one day. Name the morning's weather, then name the evening's, and see whether they are the same.